Saturday, June 26, 2010

Scrap Saturday - Blending Masks in Photoshop

This week I'm going to show you a technique to blend two photos together. This is useful when you have two similar photos and you want to use some of both - like swapping a person, or "opening" eyes of someone who blinked, or changing a head of a blurry child. It's actually really easy. Here we go:

Open your two photos side by side and make sure they have the same lighting and coloring. If not, do some tweaking. For this tutorial, I'm going to assume they look very similar. I have two photos of my cute hubby and Harvey gardening, but Harvey is pretty blurry in the first. I want to swap him out.

1. Choose one photo to be your base, and drag the other on top of it. Change the opacity of the top layer to about 45%. This is so you can see both pictures at the same time.

2. Rotate or resize your top photo and move to match exactly where you want to replace. For example - I matched up the plant since Harvey had moved for the second photo. If you are changing two parts and both don't match up in the same photo - duplicate your top layer and turn one off while you work on the first.

3. Change the opacity back to 100 percent on your top layer.

4. Turn on a layer mask by clicking on Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All. Now it will seem like the top layer is turned off, and you will only see the bottom layer.

5. Choose the brush tool.

7. Click the little arrow next to the black dot to open the brush preset ticker. Move the hardness slider all the way to zero. This will make your brush strokes blend from one photo to the other.

6. Brush over the spot you wanted to change and your top layer will show up. You can change the size of your brush in the preset ticker or by using the shortcut keys [ for smaller and ] for larger. The brush tool will make your top photo show up, and the eraser tool will make it disappear again.

8. Use the eraser tool to make parts of your top photo disappear again. Play around with the eraser and brush tools until your photo looks close to how you want it. If there are parts that you can't blend - like the top of Harvey's head in my photo below - you can use the cloning tool in just a minute.